Alan Stewart’s UK and Ireland family history news

East Kent parish records to go online

For the first time, images of over a million East Kent baptism, marriage and burial records dating back to 1538 are being made available online.

The subscription/pay-per-view website Find My Past UK has announced the award of a contract from Canterbury Cathedral Archives to publish online the historic records from the archive. The first phase of the Canterbury Collection project will see a browsable version of the parish registers of the Archdeaconry of Canterbury go online in the coming weeks.

An estimated 270,000 images containing over a million entries will be published on the website, covering parish churches from a wide expanse of East Kent, including:

the city of Canterbury;

the towns of Faversham, Wye and Elham;

Thanet;

towns along the east Kent coast stretching from Whitstable in the north round to Hythe in the south.

The launch has been timed to coincide with the temporary closure of Canterbury Cathedral Archives for refurbishment, so that family historians and local historians can continue to enjoy access to the records until the Archives reopen in autumn 2012.

From the initial online launch in February, you’ll be able to browse through the scanned pages of the parish records. At the same time, Find My Past UK will start to transcribe the records, with a view to creating an index and making them fully searchable on the website later this year.

The Canterbury Collection will join Find My Past’s other UK parish records including those from Manchester Archives, Cheshire Archives, Plymouth & West Devon Record Office and Welsh Archives, in addition to over 40 million parish records from family history societies throughout the UK in partnership with the Federation of Family History Societies.